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Congress Appears to Be Trying to Get Around Earmark Ban

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress may no longer be able to direct federal money to projects back home because of a moratorium on legislative earmarks, but that has not stopped them from trying.

A coalition of budget watchdog groups says that in the absence of the age-old practice of Congressional earmarks, the legislative tools that let members attach pet projects to bills, lawmakers appear to have found a backdoor method: special funds in spending and authorization bills that allow them to direct money to projects in their states.

“We thought we’d gotten rid of earmarks,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group in Washington that is part of the coalition. “But it looks like Congress has just moved on to other methods that are less transparent than the old way, like creating these slush funds.”

The latest example, the groups say, is the recently passed budget for the Army Corps of Engineers. Budget documents show that Congress included 26 different funds — totaling $507 million — for the corps to spend on various construction, maintenance and other projects that were not included in President Obama’s budget or the final spending bill.

Congress also gave the corps criteria to use in selecting projects and instructed it to report within 45 days about how it intends to spend the money from the funds, according to the budget documents. On Monday, the corps will release the list of projects it plans to finance.

The watchdog groups — which include the conservative National Taxpayers Union and Americans for Tax Reform, led by the antitax activist Grover Norquist — note that the 26 new corps funds add up to nearly the same amount as the earmarks in the 2010 budget. The funds are listed in the House and Senate joint report that accompanies the spending bill, but they are not in the text of the bill, one of the ways Congress used to add earmarks.

And despite a big budget deficit and calls to reduce government spending, lawmakers actually added more to the corps budget than the Obama administration had requested.

Critics say the special funds in the corps budget are the latest example of members of Congress trying to circumvent the earmark ban to funnel money to their districts, in the form of corps engineering projects. In the absence of earmarks, lawmakers have tried pressing agencies for money or in some cases threatened to tie up Congress if projects are not financed.

For example, in 2010, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, threatened to block Obama administration appointments unless money was provided for a harbor dredging project in his home state.

Will Hollier, a lobbyist and former Congressional staff member, said the financing maneuver used for the Army Corps might simply be Congress’s way of adjusting to the new realities in Washington.

“I think Congress is now starting to see that they simply can’t give up their responsibilities and leave everything to the administration,” Mr. Hollier said. “It’s their way of trying to be relevant in the post-earmark era.”

Last year, the House Armed Services Committee created a $1 billion special fund in the defense authorization bill that allowed members to add amendments that directed money to projects in their districts. Lawmakers said the amendments were not earmarks because recipients would have to compete for the money.

But a report by the staff of Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, found that 115 of the 225 amendments added had previously been earmarks. Several of the amendments were added by freshman Republicans who had campaigned against earmarks. The fund was heavily criticized, and the amendments were stripped from the bill after a public outcry.

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Robert Dillon, a spokesman for the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, which oversees the Army Corps, denied that the agency’s budget had been derived through earmarks by another name.

“These are not earmarks,” Mr. Dillon said. “Unlike earmarks, the funds are not directed to a particular project by a single member of Congress.”

The funds, he added, were for projects that were not in the president’s budget or had not been adequately funded. “The president sent over his budget, and Congress disagreed with some of his funding priorities,” Mr. Dillon said.

Gene Pawlik, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said the agency would follow whatever criteria Congress laid out in its budget instructions. He added that many of the criteria were similar to those that the corps already used.

But Mr. Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense said Congress had added other criteria, like the number of jobs provided, which makes it easier for members to force the corps to pursue what he called questionable projects that were previously financed only through earmarks.

John Paul Woodley Jr., a former assistant secretary of the Army for public works who oversaw the corps, said it was unusual for Congress to use added jobs as a criterion for corps projects.

“I can’t ever recall that being used as one of the items that we looked at when we considered a project for funding,” said Mr. Woodley, who oversaw the corps under the administration of President George W. Bush and during the early part of the Obama administration.

One example of using a jobs criterion to finance a questionable project, watchdog groups say, could be the Delaware River dredging project. For years, lawmakers from Delaware and Pennsylvania have earmarked millions of dollars to dredge the river to allow bigger ships to enter the port of Wilmington. But with an earmark ban in place, members have had to lobby the administration or the corps for money. Lawmakers and local officials have argued that the project is essential to national security and the local economy.

Wilmington is in competition with several East Coast seaports, including Charleston, S.C., Savannah, Ga., and Miami, that are seeking money from the corps for dredging projects. Officials at the ports say that an expansion of the Panama Canal will mean larger ships coming through in 2014, but that the ports are not deep enough to accommodate them.

In the past, Congressional delegations simply earmarked money for the ports, but the ban on earmarks has made it more difficult to finance the projects. Lawmakers from South Carolina, Georgia and Florida say their states would be hurt economically unless they are able to deepen their ports to allow larger ships.

Mr. Ellis said the special funds created in the corps budget seemed to be a way of skirting the earmarks ban and getting the corps to pay for the dredging.

“If that is the case, it means that the Obama administration is doing the earmarking for Congress,” Mr. Ellis said. “So much for a ban on earmarks.”

Correction: February 7, 2012

An article on Monday about efforts by members of Congress to insert money for favored projects into appropriations legislation misidentified the government position once held by John Paul Woodley Jr., who discussed the criteria for projects of the Army Corps of Engineers. He was assistant secretary of the Army for public works, not a Defense Department undersecretary.

A version of this article appears in print on February 6, 2012, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Special Funds in Budget Called New Earmarks. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe